Polish Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Lech Kołakowski says the government plans to hire a thousand hunters for the culling of wild boars. Kołakowski is specifically tasked with combating African Swine Fever and is one of the four deputy secretaries under the newly appointed Minister of Agriculture Henrik Kowalczyk.
The new hunting unit will be authorized to shoot wild boars from vehicles in the vast Polish countryside. These specialized hunters will also no longer be required to submit carcasses to certified laboratories for analysis but may bury them in pits and cover them with slaked lime.
According to Deputy Secretary Kołakowski, radical measures are necessary because the coming months will be critical. If no preventive measures are taken by March, an estimated 1.2 million wild boar piglets will be born, and in the next litter in July, more than a million additional piglets. Therefore, Polish fields must be cleared of African Swine Fever-infected wild boars before the maize is sown.
The Polish official hopes the group of more than a thousand hunters will support existing local hunting clubs, but the Polish Hunters Association rejects the new proposals. The hunters point out that shooting from vehicles has so far been prohibited for safety reasons. They also complain about having to deliver all carcasses to distant institutions while receiving only a small payment per boar, not per hour…
Among pig farmers and rural communities, there is much dissatisfaction with the insufficient culling by local hunting associations. Although they doubled the cull last year from over 400,000 to 800,000 animals, this remains inadequate given the estimated population of several million wild boars.
Moreover, hunters state that the spread of swine fever is not so much caused by roaming wild boars but rather by farmers and rural residents who, due to poor biosecurity measures, bring African Swine Fever into their farms. Poland also still fails to comply with various EU regulations in this area.
The attempt by the new Ministry of Agriculture officials to reduce hunters to the roles of 'exterminators' and 'bodyguards of agricultural crops' goes too far for the Hunters Association. According to the hunters, the proposals conflict with hunting laws, the statute of the Polish Hunters Association, and their ethical code.
Due to African Swine Fever, many 'small' Polish pig farmers have ceased operations over the past seven years. According to the Ministry of Agriculture in Warsaw, there were 179,000 individual pig farms with a total of about 10.5 million animals in 2014 – the year the highly contagious disease was first detected in Poland, averaging 59 pigs per herd.
By 2019, the number of pig farms had fallen to 116,000. By mid-2021, the government counted about 92,000 pig farms, representing a nearly 50 percent decrease compared to 2014.